On The Menu: Black Prophecy Footage

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Via the all-encompassing bloggings of Castle Crecente, we discover deep-space menu browsing from the other forthcoming space MMO, Black Prophecy. Despite spending a long time on snazzy GUI, it’s got atmosphere coming out of its coaxial thrusters, and it gets rather exciting at about 4:40. I hope there’s a cockpit-free first person mode.

I think this game’s success is going to hinge on how smooth the combat is. The flight-sim kind of combat isn’t everyone’s cup of tea – and quite often you need an extra seven senses, and spatial awareness to make an airbus pilot jealous to be any good at it.

Still, I hope they pull it off because it looks interesting, and will be a change of pace from most MMOs out there right now.

I think first-person with cockpit is much better than without, as long as the cockpit actually serves a gameplay function. In this trailer it seems like all it does is obstruct the player’s view, instead of a real cockpit’s function of providing information to the player.

Like the music, I take it thats not stand in music from some other composer? I like the idea of ship building/design there, but I’m not sure I like the drop down menu implementation of it.
Also, the menu system has no style, why not a Privateer like space station internals menu where you can go to the bar and see other players and stuff, doesn’t have to be 1st/3rd person walking around as long as its something that prevents menu screen overload/fatigue from becomming a problem.

Also hope that as your ship takes hull damage non-vital displays and stuff blow up and give an indication that your ship is in a bit of a mess, I miss little touches like those in games these days.

Ok, that was very impressive gameplay shown. Even though it’s still alpha I presume. Looked very nice, and the modular stuff seems to work ok too. (the engine mod is immediately visible, which is a nice touch)

Overal, interest remains, lets see that beta queue pay off, been in there for months. ^^

Neocron was bugged to hell and, more critically than poor programming, so much stuff was done client-side it was haxtastic. i mean, i hope they’ve learned from their mistakes, but seeing as neocron 2 (*cough 1.2*) changed absolutely none of that, i seriously doubt it.

expect a promising beta followed by a swift decent into total toilet upon release as all the hax make it a pointless farce.

If they are making it instanced like this, I’d almost rather see a Call of Duty 4 implementation of the genre. Go to a general lobby where you have two teams competing, or one team working on an assault/defend type mission.

The problem I have with MMO’s like this is trying to gather a group. In EVE Online, it’s particularly hard since if it’s a mission, only the person who initiates the mission gets the benefit. So there’s no motivation for others to join you outside of loot that drops.

With a lobby system, there can still be experience gathering (for skills), and they could have a bounty and objective reward system for earning money that can be used to buy ships and components.

Because of Elite, it seems that every space sim is required to have an economy, no matter how badly it’s implemented. I think that all the genre needs is a good rethinking. Freespace did this by introducing an innovatively simple control scheme that made it so that a joystick is not required, as a result it was very popular.

But Black Prophesy? I have little hope for it lasting long. It looks near identical to Jumpgate Evolution, we don’t really need two games to fill the same void.

did anyone catch in the mission selection screen the pvp option ? if you can select missions that have a pvp component to them that may be interesting if done correctly .
still looking forward to see how this game pans out ..

I wouldn’t place too much hope on this. ReaKKtor has a history of screwing its fans over and over and over and over, with the support team consisting of incredibly petty anal kids

Neocron was a disaster. From the open beta up until the release of the game’s “expansion pack” (Beyond Dome of York), people have been complaining about lag and sync issues. Yes, 3 years after beta and the same problem persists. Neocron had issues too that were never resolved for a long time, such as the horrible newbie zone. Like I said, the support was just piss poor

The video looks nice though, but like I said, I wouldn’t place my money on it being a long term RPG

“The problem I have with MMO’s like this is trying to gather a group. In EVE Online, it’s particularly hard since if it’s a mission, only the person who initiates the mission gets the benefit. So there’s no motivation for others to join you outside of loot that drops.”

@Chiablo: that’s no longer true, when delivering a completed mission you have the option of completing it with your gang (up to 10 pilots) and all get an equal share of the rewards and Loyalty Points aswell as the full standing increase. It has been that way for atleast 2 years (the age of my character), so the idea is there. And there are some missions which were designed with gangs in mind. (Level 5 missions include enemies up to Capital Ships, but the rewards are fairly low)

The new Wormhole systems, especially the higher quality ones are effectively impossible solo and as such encourage gang-PvE quite a bit. The enemies there also have far more advanced AI than the rest of EVE and pose quite a challenge to even a group of ships.
(On the test servers they even managed to take out player capitalships on a regular basis.)

1) Black Prophecy is still a rubbish name. I only can think of MLKJ’s “I have a dream” speech. That was a proper good black prophecy.

2) The investors are clearly confident that this will make a decent return. It’s still at a (relatively) early stage and the orchestral/choral score is in place? There’s a big wodge of moolah behind this. Oh, and for the early bit of the video, if you were expecting a Viggo Mortensen to start talking in elvish or something, you were right to. TOTALLY stole that riff from Lord of the Rings.*

3) Mechanically it looks pretty exciting. Proper swooshy-spaceships, beautiful backdrops, BAM-BAM-BAM and all that. Oh, and anyone else notice towards the end as the engines brushed an ice asteroid, a cloud of vapour was thrown up? Very nice attention to detail. Only shame is there’s apparently no docking. LET ME DOCK!

4) Instanced missions… epic story… Sigh. I really don’t give a monkey’s nut about all that. And if they really try and push it hard, we may have problems. The reason Eve remains in such rude health is that it’s based around pvp and land-grabs. Pvp with consequence. It works, people should be copying it. If all I’m doing it playing someone else’s story, then count me out.

5) I miss the angry dude. He’d better be doing the tutorial voiceover.

Typical, you want a space MMO with real-time combat, then two come along at once. Hmm, this or Jumpgate: Evolution? Still can’t decide yet. Instancing in either case would detract from the openness that we all know EVE does so well.

That does look very nice. Personally I welcome the instancing, as otherwise popular quest zones will just end up overcrowded with campers waiting for the repop. Hence the reason instancing was invented in the first place I think. Besides I like the idea of embarking on a mission with just my friends with no one else around to spoil things or cause grief. Anyway I very much doubt that all the missions will be instanced.

As for open PvP and “Pvp with consequence”, well that’s not everyones cup of tea. It certainly isn’t my idea of fun. Eve seems to have just about managed it OK. Although it’s one of the main reasons why I won’t play EVE. You only have to look at the mess Darkfall has rapidly descended into to see how quickly an open PvP system with consequence can go very wrong.

One thing that is good about an mmo like this is that at least when players idle it would be alright to have stopped ships drifting in space as opposed to fantasy mmos where people just stand around in public areas forever. I know, total nitpick but it always bugged me.

“The new Wormhole systems, especially the higher quality ones are effectively impossible solo and as such encourage gang-PvE quite a bit. The enemies there also have far more advanced AI than the rest of EVE and pose quite a challenge to even a group of ships.”

christ tell me about it for some reason even if im in a fleet of ships with many others stronger or weaker than me the bloody sleepers will fucking always go for me often ignoring the 5 bloody frigates that are jamming their buddy’s

@Dalig varg: I know the feeling, speed-tanking them if relatively easy though, their tracking horrid.

But my alliance generally brings a scorp or 2 to keep the entire spawn jammed.
They use magnetometric sensors, so packing racial jammers makes it a lot easier. If you miss a cycle though, that scorp is pretty much toast, although remote reps help in that case. (Plate the scorp to have atleast some buffer)

The menu system is spectacularly dull – one of the small joys of Elite was making it to the safety of a station, an effect enhanced by a its visual and aural disjoint as if you had stepped out of the cockpit. This system has all the engagement of changing your anti-aliasing setting or key mappings.

Instancing – bah. I don’t remember this being necessary on Jumpgate, why do we need it 5 years later? Eve definitely has the right idea here.

Shocking script – I realise this is pre-release, but having your wingman regularly offer such gems as “GUESS WHAT? I HAVEN’T EVEN START YET!” and “WHO IS THE TOUGH GUY NOW?” doesn’t exactly fill me with confidence. Or add anything other than irritation for that matter.

The cockpit view – what’s the point of a view which restricts your view to the middle third of your screen?

Colour me disappointed. I hope I’m wrong or that Jumpgate Evolution does a better job.

Fair enough, I’ve barely played Eve to be honest. Does it work – or does it just feel like an inconsistency in an otherwise consistent game world? Or do they wrap it up in enough suitable fiction that it doesn’t matter?

@Meat Circus, while that is true, instancing generally means that it happens seperated from the universe the instance is spawned in, which in EVE is not the case. With a little patience and the right skills you can scan down a pilot in a complex and ambush him/her. Entire pirate corps/alliances thrive on that sort of thing.

well just repeating what our ECM expert tried out, he concluded after some testing that Magnetometric ECM was doing better than the other 3. :)
Remote rep BS certainly help, especially on the buffer side.

“4) Instanced missions… epic story… Sigh. I really don’t give a monkey’s nut about all that. And if they really try and push it hard, we may have problems. The reason Eve remains in such rude health is that it’s based around pvp and land-grabs. Pvp with consequence. It works, people should be copying it. If all I’m doing it playing someone else’s story, then count me out.”

@Bobsy: Yes! And how many times have we not heard someone say, “Well, I really want to like EVE, but it’s just too tedious.”? Or, “I love reading about EVE, its stories are amazing – too bad it’s so boring to play.”?

Marry this game, along with its action and hands on-flight with the universe and depth of EVE, and you’ll have a kickass game. That could be very big. I sometimes wonder why CCP don’t do this themselves, but then again they have said that they’ve thought about it.

They’re probably cautious not to scare away their established fanbase though. Maybe in ten years, eh?